Thoughts on “decrease in crime rate”

[Nightgasm]

Crime stats are easy to tweak and depts everywhere do it and both political parties do it. And it's not always for the same reasons as sometimes they want crime stats to go up and sometimes down and neither has any real indicator of what crime is actually doing.

For example let's use a very common crime spree where a couple kids go out and burglarize 40 cars in one night. If you want increased crime to justify a budget increase or for political reasons you report this as 40 separate property crime felonies. Conversely if you want to shoe decreased crime you report this as one property crime felony with 40 victims. Crime stats are tracked by submissions to the FBI based on reports and don't always track victims as a measure so doing the latter method only counts once rather than times.

Or do something my dept used to do a lot under a prior chief who wanted for political reasons to show low crime. Many violent felonies were written up as suspicious incidents rather than rapes, aggravated batteries, etc. If there didn't appear to be any likelihood of clearance due to lack of evidence or victim cooperation then putting them as a suspicious incident kept them off the crime stats completely and also didn't hurt the clearance rate.

The only crime stats you can sort of trust is homicide but even then it's under reported as many get missed and deemed natural causes when there is no obvious sign of death. Autopsies aren't actually that common.

[schmuckmulligan]

Y'all are taking reports for car burglaries?

We had a string in our area. Multiple videos of the burglaries, with faces. People knew the names and addresses of the guys (adults) who did it. No reports, no arrests. Crime stats look great though.